Unspoken
by BrownRecluse
Summary: Severus and Bellatrix, alone on a wintry afternoon in Spinner's End before it all went to Hell in a hand basket. Rated for mature theme.


All _Harry Potter _characters belong to J. K. Rowling. I'm just borrowing her wonderful characters for a bit of a lark. No copyright infringement intended and no money changing hands here. Carry on!

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**Unspoken**

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They have nothing in common…

He's a poor boy, while she's a pureblood, always prancing about like royalty in her velvet and lace. Dripping with disdain - for him and all those like him, whose heritage is less than whole - she flaunts her body, dangling intimations of ecstasy, flimsy as her bodice lace, like a dark prize over his head. While she may be practiced in this woman's game, in the shadow of her promises, he, barely a man, can still sense the double-edged blade strung on a single strand of her glossy ebony: a reminder constant as the blood in her veins.

She is older, almost a lifetime older to someone his age, and much like the star for which she was named, Bellatrix Black burns, brittle and enigmatic, from an impossible distance. While her heavenly body may orbit forever beyond his reach, Severus never tires of gazing beyond the binding horizon, his mind reaching into that mysterious ether to fondle those precious, forbidden things - for he is still naïve enough to believe a figurative blade cannot render flesh or cause him to bleed.

She loves to be looked at, and Bella likes what happens to Severus the few times she's caught him looking at her, although any effect she has on him always leaves her raw and aching.

They are not friends…

She doesn't know him very well, yet one, winter afternoon finds her at Spinner's End. Her life is over; his parents are dead. The day is already old, and the sky is grey as the snow that turns to slush upon the cobblestones that pave the narrow street, when she Apparates into the slums in the middle of nowhere. _This_ place was what her mind grasped as she turned on her heel, her father's words still ringing in her ears.

She's to be married to a stranger in three months hence - what's one stranger more? She unties her cloak; its silk lining crackles with static as it falls around her.

Her rage ripples just beneath her skin, radiating white heat, cold fury, and sparking in the space between them, but Severus, no stranger to fury, is not afraid. After all, this anger is not for him: it is just a wild force seeking a channel, an outlet, a release. His own loss, a grief he cannot articulate - if indeed, it is even grief, for at times it seems more like something caught between remorse and relief - is a frigid sludge slogging through his veins, an ice foot's deliberate contraction around his heart, an ice floe begging to be broken.

In the parlour, the fire's gone out. They sit and stare across the coffee table, the day grows old, earth becomes indistinguishable from sky in a veil of falling snow, and two strangers suddenly find themselves chafing in the vacuum of silence between each tick of the mantle clock in a cold, empty house. Fallen star and slumlord.

Together.

Alone.

They do not speak.

Her dress, the color of smoldering embers, slides off one shoulder. He tries to swallow, but finds his throat has turned to ashes.

Their eyes connect across a charged space.

She licks her lips. Her wand clatters to the floor.

He doesn't know how it happened. She doesn't know who started it, but once he's buried inside her, grinding his hips into hers, his tongue tracing the curve of her ear, the hollow of her shoulder, and plumbing the tropic of her mouth, what does it matter? Their bodies, displacing the desolation of the room with desperate, wordless syllables, unite with the single intention of unraveling all secrets of the universe and closing the impossible distances between them through the simple instance of a shuddering alchemical reaction: the shock of skin on skin… the pleasure of lips and teeth and tongues.

No spell, no potion, has ever made her feel like this. His body, all angles and muscles and bone, is maddening, pale perfection; his sighs, softer than the shadows creeping and lengthening around them. She cannot control the ghosts of desire bursting from her parted lips in wispy gusts, streaming white heat in the freezing room. She cannot contain the trembling, the quaking that erupts from her inner recesses and the hot, musky slickness between that begs him, commands him. Nails digging into his backside, bucking and pushing against him, she screams, as their trysting shakes the plaster from the walls—

_This._

_Here._

_Now!_

He moans, spilling his fluid heat into the unseen as she shatters around him, emptying himself deep, so deep inside her, while riding the waves of their shared decrescendo on swells of silence to something that is neither completion nor contentment.

Both feel pain in the growing absence, the burning when he finally pulls away: a hollow born in the blood drawn from the ghost of a blade.

They make no promises.

Promises are for lovers.

He smoothes the wrinkles from her dress, her cloak, and kisses her tenderly one, last time. Turning on her heel, tossing a haughty smile over her shoulder, she disappears with a sound that rings like steel in the moonless dark.

She never tells him he was her first.

Or the rest…

Her fleeting smile, a ha'penny for his thoughts; his lingering kiss, pennyroyal for her tea. The secret crimson spiraling, her private hell in a pensieve; time, relentless as an ever-widening river, an ever-lengthening orbit between them.

When they meet again, there is too much bloodshed between them, too much ink beneath their skin to rebuild that bridge. And if he remembers, his eyes betray nothing.

Years later, when she is alone again, alone in another cold house, beside another who will always remain a stranger, the spouse who shares her bed of thorns, the strand broken, the double-edged sword between them, and each scarred numb, she looks out the window at the silent shroud of falling snow.

Winter always reminds her of him, but memory's caress, soft and fragile as a snowflake, is every bit as cold, stinging as it melts into the skin of the past. She will never tell a living soul what her heart now whispers to the indifferent darkness, to a lover lost in the Longaway and the Farago—

_It should have been you…_

The echo of a dying star.

She wonders if he knows... if he ever really knew.


End file.
